


Empty Soul, Lonely Heart

by thegingermidget



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Post 3x06
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:55:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24360949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegingermidget/pseuds/thegingermidget
Summary: Why Villanelle broke down on the bathroom floor and what she is going to do about it.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Kudos: 28





	Empty Soul, Lonely Heart

The bathroom floor was a liminal space. From here, you were toddler, too young to care how cold the tile was; teenager, puking in the toilet; adult, hiding in the bathroom stall at work; and whoever you were now.

Villanelle was not sure who she was now. She could not even say who she wanted to be. She was tired, feeling more strung out than she had ever been. Her tears had been wrung out from within her, clawed from her eyes with streaks of mascara to mark the carnage. She was hardly in control over the words that passed her lips and yet she meant them.

“I don’t want to do this anymore.”

Dasha had done her best to console her, but even she seemed to know that something was seriously wrong, something she had never seen from her pupil before. 

“Clean yourself up, take a bath, and go to bed. You’ll feel better in the morning.” The look in Dasha’s eyes was skeptical, but Villanelle did not see.

Villanelle’s throat felt raw. Her chest was empty. She felt like a child she had never been, screaming and crying for someone’s attention. Her mother had insisted that she had never cried as a baby and suggested that she would have liked her better if she had. 

Her arm ached and her head was cloudy. The aftershock of adrenaline had long since worn away and she was left feeling as though the floor had just given way. She knew that some people had strong adverse reactions to shock; that they needed to be held, comforted, when their own bodies could no longer do the job for them. Villanelle was not one of those people, she thought, staring at her hands and watching them shake. 

Villanelle was not one of those people, but maybe she could be.

She thought she could spend all night on the bathroom floor. Her ass was already growing numb from the cold tile. It would serve Dasha right to have to pick her up off of the floor in the morning, to come in and face the wreck of a human being she had created. Villanelle decided against that though. She had a headache. She was covered in blood. She needed to take off her bra. 

From where she sat on the floor, she stripped her clothes. Boots, pants, and underthings were piled in a heap on the tile before she managed to stand up and face herself in the mirror. Her fingertips grazed the lines of mascara on her cheeks. They were funny, in a certain way, because they were not manufactured but genuine, the product of real pain and anguish for once. 

She had trouble taking off her shirt and bra. Her one arm did not want any part of reaching behind her back or above her head. 

She had been careless today. She should have seen that man grab at her belt, felt him. Should have predicted that he might fight back. She had never been careless before. She might have looked it, sure. When planning kills that looked like accidents, it was easy to make the final result look like the product of luck. But Villanelle had never been lucky. 

Something inside her was broken, though. That part of her that told her how things would play out, the part that remembered everything she had been taught and everything she hadn’t. Call it instinct or intuition. 

She lacked drive, ambition, purpose. And the worst part, was that she suspected that this yawning emptiness inside of her had been growing for longer than she knew. She had loved her life in Paris, but hadn’t she been empty there too? Hadn’t she been getting tired of performing the same jobs over and over, learning nothing and going nowhere?

After Rome, she had decided that she wanted power. She wanted to see the faces of the people who had given her orders, wanted to know what it felt like to tell someone else to kill. But she had been a fool to think that people in power would ever choose to give it up. 

Villanelle turned on the shower and stepped in. She couldn’t stomach a bath, not tonight. Lying in a pool of her own filth for hours wasn’t the same as committing herself to sleeping on the floor. If she was going to try to pull herself together, to touch herself and let her hands tell her bones that she was going to be alright, she needed to keep moving. She needed to scrub the sweat from her skin and the makeup from her face with a constant, fierce effort. She needed to tire herself out in the process of removing all marks of the past day, tear her hair out at the roots in an effort to immolate her doubts and imperfections in a cleansing fire. 

When Villanelle finished her shower and walked into the bedroom wet and wrapped in a robe, she saw that Dasha had left. Back to wherever she lived, hiding until whatever storm raging within Villanelle had swept back out to sea. 

Villanelle wanted to pout. She wanted to rage. She wanted to throw things at the wall until the broke and cut up her feet. She had that anger within her and enough of a sense of disconnect between her actions and their consequences to go through with whatever savage impulse moved her. 

Instead, she walked over to the french doors overlooking the backyard of her house and the view that had dazzled her, brought some spark of life back to her, when she had first seen it. The heat of the day had vanished into a cool night and the breeze in the air brought gooseflesh to the bare skin of her chest. The rest of the city thrummed with life far away while she was alone here in the dark. 

She was struck by the emptiness inside her, the void she had grown familiar with, that she knew to be as much a part of herself as her hair or her skin or the clothes she wore. It ached now, blistered, like shoes that no longer fit. She pushed against the edges of it and chafed against the space between itself and her. 

More than anything she was struck by the thought that she had no idea what she was doing here. What was she doing here in this house, in this city, in this job? What did she want?

And it was a shame really, that she had only one clear idea of what she wanted. All she saw when she looked off into the shadowy realm of her future was the image of one person. One person who wasn’t anywhere near her right now, off in another country with nothing to do with her. 

Which really begged the question, what the hell was she doing here?

Perhaps there was no one else in the world she could really count on. Not Dasha, not Konstantin, not her mother, not the Twelve. Villanelle held her arms and rubbed them gently to keep away the chill. Perhaps she should have learned her lesson long ago that she could only really count on herself. 

But if that were the case, and her strongest desires led in only one direction, shouldn’t she listen?

Villanelle tried to imagine the look on Dasha’s face when she discovered Villanelle was not there. Would she be surprised? Unsurprised? Disappointed?

She should be proud. Proud that Villanelle managed to find a way out where Dasha never could. Proud that Villanelle had chosen to take control of her life where Dasha had spent hers under the thumb of someone else. 

With that she was decided. She turned back towards the house and crept back inside. Her bare feet stuck to the tile floors. She would take off, head to London as soon as she could, see Eve one more time. Then she would vanish, throwing the Twelve off of her scent. How hard could it really be to evade them? She knew all of their best tricks. 

And at the first sign that she might be safe? She could work on taking them down, seizing that power for herself once and for all. 

And who knew? She might need a partner for that.

**Author's Note:**

> Dipping my toes back into fic writing, its been a couple of months. I feel like this particular fic has a shelf life of about two hours with episode 7 coming out tonight but it was nice to get the gears turning again. Villanelle is such an awesome character and I love getting into her head. Plus, I find writing fic more fun than writing meta. I hope you enjoyed! Maybe come find me on twitter (@a_ginger_midget) or Tumblr (@thegingermidget)?


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